Exclusive – Star Citizen Goes to ACTUAL SPACE with MyRadar!

A couple of years ago, I brought you guys news that Star Citizen was collaborating with a company called MyRadar that makes a weather app for phones. It's a terrestrial weather app simply has a twist. The CEO of MyRadar, Andy Light-green also happens to be a Star Citizen capitalist so he decided to add some of the in game planets into MyRadar and this partnership with Cloud Imperium Games was announced two years ago at CitizenCon.

Well, that collaboration has connected, and today we bring y'all exclusive news of its latest development, an evolution which will see MyRadar and Star Denizen going to space properly! MyRadar is launching a satellite into space and in a crazy twist, the Star Denizen capitalist decided that he would put the Star Citizen logo on the satellite itself so that it will make Star Citizen the first videogame in space! This is no glory project and every bit you'll run into in the video and interview beneath, has real world implications that will assist real people.

This news obviously comes ahead of this year's CitizenCon outcome tomorrow which nosotros'll be covering. Let'south simply say that a weather app with in game weather may just prove useful in future versions if some of the rumours circulating are to be believed...

For at present though, I got to ask Andy Green a few questions well-nigh the satellite that MyRadar will be launching. They've made a video talking a fleck about information technology and from the (admittedly little) I understand about real world space and satellite'southward this sounds astonishing. Check the video out here:

Wccftech: Infinite! It'southward astonishing, what the Star Citizen customs is doing and launching a satellite is unbelievable! Given MyRadar is a weather app, can I assume that the satellite will be for giving you lot guys more granular data to employ inside the app?

Andy Green: This commencement satellite is an introductory satellite that will be a testbed for the aviation side of our business; it will listen to shipping tracking signals from space and transmit them back down to the ground. This is incredibly helpful as nowadays twenty-four hours infrastructure requires an aircraft to be in range of a ground-based tracking station in order to receive timely information on it. Receiving the signals from space will permit us to runway trans-oceanic aircraft, which would have been a tremendous help locating some loftier-profile missing aircraft tragedies in the last decade.

Our second satellite, already in evolution, volition be our testbed for weather-related sensing. It volition wait down upon the earth using a patent-pending imaging technique, and the data we go back from the observations volition assistance with everything from hurricane predictions to agricultural analysis.

Westward: How did the idea to launch your own satellite first come up about? I can't imagine that many other weather companies accept their own satellites.

AG: Substantially, nosotros saw a gap in the ability to provide some of the information we're about to showtime collecting with the new satellites, and with launch costs coming down and our in-house technical capabilities up to the claiming, we decided to movement alee and launch our own. The aircraft tracking data volition exist able to provide an important safety service that frankly should take been in place long ago, and the weather/environmental observation satellite with its unique image processing will give us some incredible insight that no i else is able to provide. We'll be able to provide all of this data through the MyRadar app to the millions of people who employ it every solar day, including the ability to task satellites to take custom imagery.

W: What type of satellite is it? Who makes it? What company will launch it?

AG: We are engineering and building both satellites in-house. The beginning satellite is a pocket-cube satellite. It'll exist launching into space very shortly on the Rocket Labs "We're Running Out of Fingers" mission, with our launch partner Alba Orbital. The launch window opens this calendar month on November 28th

Westward: I assume given it's a satellite, it'll have lots of sensing equipment in it, which ship would y'all most closely associate information technology with from Star Citizen? The Carrack peradventure equally an explorer?

AG: Given its smaller size and specific mission, I think I'd nigh closely associate information technology with the Terrapin! It's designed to hide out quietly in space, slipping "under the radar", and its main mission is to track other vehicles and relay that information back to control ?

West: Star Denizen stuff, what specific artwork will be going up on the satellite? Will it be on
the exterior? Inside? Both?

AG: The cubesat will accept the Star Denizen logo emblazoned on the outside of one size of the satellite. Check out this promo video nosotros fabricated where you can see it!

W: Exercise you Really need a satellite for myradar or is this only your style of getting in to infinite while we wait for affordable commercial infinite travel??

AG: As the initial satellites are just the testbeds, their early-stage purpose is to establish the workflow and proof of concepts, simply both of them volition still be fully functional. Information technology'south the intention to launch a constellation of the satellites to allow us more than global coverage for both services each satellite was designed to address.

In the case of the aircraft tracker (the ane launching shortly), this is part of ACME AtronOmatic, LLC'southward original core business concern (Peak is the parent company of the MyRadar app). MyRadar currently provides aircraft tracking services as well as inflow and departure delay information, gate information, and other flight details that tin can assist both the casual traveler and aircraft pilots/operators.

In the case of the weather condition/environmental satellite, the new types of imagery we'll exist able to collect will, among a plethora of other tasks, be able to look inside the eye wall of a hurricane with a 3D perspective, allowing u.s.a. to go greater details on the intensity and temperatures at the center of these storms. This data tin then in turn exist used every bit inputs to existing forecast models to provide for greater accuracy in tracking these deadly storms. The satellite will also be equipped with a visual-spectrum camera, then we'll be able provide both the custom data imaging and regular visual imaging of the earth below, and we'll be able to offer these on-demand to users right from the app.

Check out the MyRadar app here:

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